Last week my wife and I went shopping as some of our favorite places – second hand stores. I was preparing for total knee replacement and I needed some durable medical supplies (canes, walkers, ice packs, etc.)

The store we visited is called Kathleen’s Kornor. As you can imagine Kathleen is the owner and a friend. She is on West market Street in Akron, what is referred to as the Highland Square Area.

While visiting, the internet went down and Kathleen could not take credit cards.

This individual wanted to buy a roll of shelving paper and had no cash. He wanted to use his card, which could not be processed because of the internet problems.

I offer to pay cash and only ask that he pay it forward. He actually refused.

Not wanting Kathleen to lose the sales, I gave Kathleen the money. He offered to reimburse me $1.

As I walked out the store I simply asked him to pay it forward.

As I walked out the door I wondered why he resisted our simply request.

This got me thinking about all the times I refused help because of pride, time, embarrassment and other strange things we humans sometime do to ourselves.

So now I have a request I would like you to pay it forward. My Coauthor Dr. Tony Alessandra if offering a DISC assessment at no charge ($79 value). Here are the details. You can receive some great information and help someone at the same time.

Author and speaker James Rohn said, “Never wish your life was easier… wish that YOU were better.”

So often we spend our time trying to find new ways to improve our earning potential. The fact is we need to build our earning power inside ourselves. I call it: Learning is Earning…. and learning creates earning significant earning power.

I have a passion for learning and helping others learn. We know individuals who make a commitment to learn on a regular basis will earn more and realize their dreams quicker and more completely.

My version of “learning is earning” is found in the concept of continuous learning, which has become prominent over the past decade. Organizations are changing rapidly. Therefore, it’s difficult to find any approach to doing anything in organizations that doesn’t soon become outdated.

You must continue to upgrade your skill set regularly. Stephen Covey says: “The half-life of your knowledge is only 2-3 years.” Consider how fast information and technology are changing. It is estimated that the amount of new information will double every 72 hours by 2015. How do you keep up? How do you keep making yourself valuable to your organization? You must keep up by focusing on yourself and the principles of continuous learning. You must set goals to constantly add value to your organization.

The concept of continuous or self directed learning has become important because it places priority on noticing, adapting and learning from change. .

Self-directed training includes the learner initiating the learning, making the decisions about what training and development experiences will occur, and how. The learner selects and carries out their own learning goals, objectives, methods and means to verify that the goals were met.

But, where do we find this new knowledge?

One of the best sites I have found in years for continuous learning is a recently launched web site www.iLearningglobal.tv . It is a subscription-based website that gives subscribers the opportunity to learn, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week from the experts in the Professional and Personal Development arena. Check it out when you have a chance. In fact if you are interested to learn more, Ron Finklestein and Ralph Berge are hosting an introductory event on February 26th at Rosemont Country Club from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Register at: http://akrisilg.eventbrite.com or call me at 330-990-0788 for details on this free tour of the web site. I guarantee it will be worth your time.

I was watching a powerful training video by Dennis Deaton on www.ilearningglobal.biz/ronf where he discussed the power of the mind and how what we think impacts our life.

He builds a strong case for improving our thinking processes. He states that “The truth of life is that we alter our destiny by altering our thoughts.”

For example, he discusses our relationship with money. We can alter our relationship to money by altering our thoughts. He states “money does what I cause it to do.” If we are not happy with the money in our lives we must change how we view our relationship with money.

We do this by altering our thoughts. As we alter our thoughts we change our life.

Because we totally under estimate our potential, we negatively impact our happiness. Deaton discusses fundamental and distinguishing characteristics of happy and effective people are their thought process.

Everything we do we do first in our mind.

The single determinant (to our happiness, success, etc) is a print out of our states of mind: we accept and believe what we think.

We are not locked into a specific state of mind; we can change our mental habits, our thinking processes.

What makes us human is that we can think about our thinking while we are thinking. Because we can do this we can analyze our thoughts and change our thinking

Change is a conscious choice.

As we revisit our attitudes and analyze them we can reconfigure them. But we must take ownership for these beliefs. When we do this we begin to understand that we are ordinary people who discover they can produce extraordinary results.

How do we do this? Do not repress a thought – redirect a thought – introduce a new topic.

We must feed our thoughts for them to stay alive. We feed them by giving them our attention

We can choose not to indulge certain thoughts as we shift our attention.

I received a call from a very depressed person and to compound matters she was mad at herself because she could not think her way out of the problem. She saw herself as a failure because she could not use the law of attraction to “attract” herself from her depression.

I asked her what herself talk was. She said I am always telling myself that “I am not depressed!” We talked about many things but I wanted her to understand that the unconscious does not understand the word not.

Let me give you an example. DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE COLOR GREEN.

What is the first thing that comes into your mind? The color green.

As she repeated the words “I am not depressed!” she was actually focusing on being depressed. I asked her to think differently by focusing on what she wanted (happiness) and not on what she did not want (depression.)

The mind attracts what it thinks about. Focus on what you want. I ask her to say “I am happy” instead of “I am not depressed.” This is very empowering to move toward what you want.

The other thing I asked her to think about was her belief system about depression. She felt she was not a good person because she was depressed. As a result of her depression she felt guilty because she was not the best mother and wife she felt she could be. When she thought about not being a good mother, I asked her to ask herself this question: Is there a different way to look at this situation?

Maybe, I suggested, she was doing what see need to do to take care of herself and we needed to help her find a more healthy way to do that. NOTE: I encouraged her to get professional help for those of you who are wondering.)

She thought herself into a problem (depression); only changing her thinking could put her on the path of taking corrective action.

Ask yourself, how could I look at this situation differently? In what ways can I look at this situation differently? This focuses you on an outcome, what you want and not on what you do not want.